Publications

Correlating cookoff violence with pre-ignition damage

Wente, William W.; Kaneshige, Michael J.

Predicting the response of energetic materials during accidents, such as fire, is important for high consequence safety analysis. We hypothesize that responses of ener-getic materials before and after ignition depend on factors that cause thermal and chemi-cal damage. We have previously correlated violence from PETN to the extent of decom-position at ignition, determined as the time when the maximum Damkoehler number ex-ceeds a threshold value. We seek to understand if our method of violence correlation ap-plies universally to other explosive starting with RDX.